Think of Kashmiri cuisine and visions of deliciously spicy meat dishes, the kahva (salt tea), and the delicate flavor of saffron come to mind. The Kashmiris are passionate about their food and this is evident from the amount of time they spend either cooking it or discussing about it. That the kitchen is typically the best decorated room in the house says a lot about its importance. However, contrary to impressions of those living outside the state, every Kashmiri meal is not an eight-course wazwan.
ABOUT THE STATE
Kashmir is one of the most scenic and beautiful places of India. It is a part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, which comprises the Jammu region, the Kashmir Valley, and Ladakh. Though affected by political violence for over a decade now, Kashmir is are gentle and food loving people and their elaborate banquets are world famous. INFLUENCES
Kashmiri fare boasts of a huge repertoire belonging to two parallel cuisines, the Pandit and the Muslim. Surprisingly, meat and rice are common to both.
Unlike any other Brahmin community in India, the Kashmiri Brahmins eat meat. However, instead of onions and garlic, favorites of the Muslim cuisine, they use hing (asafetida) and powdered dry ginger, which the Muslims keep away from.
STAPLES & SOURCES
Mutton and rice, in that order, are the staple diet of all Kashmiris. Chicken and fish too find a place, but the all-important ingredient for daily food is the sheep's meat.
Almost every part of the mutton is used to make some delicacy or the other and people buy meat of the specific part of the sheep according to the dish to be cooked that day.
The importance of rice in Kashmir can be gauged from the fact that the Kashmiri word for food is the same as that for rice. The chief crop grown in the valley, the rice eaten for lunch and dinner by Kashmiris is not the long-grained basmati variety but one quite dense and sticky.
An important source of vegetables and fruits are the floating gardens. An ingenious method of layering rich soil and organic fertilizer onto a floating bed of bamboo and twigs ensures that the vegetables that are grown on these 'gardens' are always on the surface of the water. Tomatoes, spinach greens, turnips are some of the vegetables that are grown on the lake and sold every day at dawn in a unique floating market from one boat to another.
Though black or green cardamoms, cinnamon, cloves, red chilly powder, turmeric and powdered aniseed and other spices are widely used, the most common is a spice cake called ver, the recipe of which varies from kitchen to kitchen. Ver is made once a year by pounding together large quantities of the garlic and red chilly along with other spices and is used all the year round. Pran, a shallot-like onion having cooling properties, is commonly used in Kashmiri cooking but is not found outside the valley.
METHODS
One of the most complicated recipes for stewed broth comes from Kashmir. Endless cutting, pounding and sautéing are done to produce Kashmiri delicacies like rista and gushtaba. However, thankfully for the everyday cooks and housewives, these intricate culinary miracles are not a part of the daily fare that Kashmir is have. For daily consumption, meat is cooked variously with tomatoes, potatoes, green peas, spinach, turnips, green lentils, and Kashmir's indigenous spinach greens called haq to produce mouth-watering results.
During the winter months, the vegetables dried in autumn are used, albeit sparingly, for making the various stews and curries. A smooth blend of onions and tomatoes to which spices and ver are added is the base of the gravy. Contrary to the general impression that is held outside Kashmir, no fruits, dry fruits or saffron is used in everyday cooking.
The excellent chutneys that accompany any Kashmiri meal are quite simple to make. Roughly, equal proportions of white radish and onion are pounded with green chilly for piquancy, fresh coriander, and a few walnuts to make the mixture 'heating' enough. Salt and a few spoonfuls of curd are then added to the mixture. For grander occasions, radish is omitted and a liberal quantity of walnuts is added. On the other hand, salads, which in Kashmiri cuisine are slices of carrots, cucumber and white radish, are nothing to write home about.
Tea with milk and sugar is almost a taboo in the Kashmiri kitchen as the only tea anyone wants is the indigenous salt tea or the kahva. The tea is made by boiling fresh cut-tear-curl Assam green tea in water for half an hour, then adding milk, salt, and soda, and cooking the mixture till it gets a pink cast. It is then poured into a copper samovar whose central "chimney" is filled with live coals. After this, a sip is poured out for the head of the family to approve and then the tea is served to the rest in shallow bowls without handles.
All this goes as far as the daily cooking is concerned. However, the wazwans are a different matter altogether. The repertoire and the methods adopted by the wazas or cooks are all the same, yet the results can be strikingly different. Given the importance of meat, the crucial task of carving the mutton goes to the head waza while the junior helper does chores like pounding chilies. The grinding and pounding goes on for hours together till the Wazwan is ready.
SPECIALITIES & SWEETS
Some of the specialties that have their origins in the Kashmiri system of culinary experimentation are lotus stem with whole green lentils, dried rings with aubergines and fish with white radish.
Meat being the staple, most of the special dishes have mutton as a major ingredient. Nahari, a special breakfast dish, is a stew of trotters and tongue, seasoned with cassia buds, cardamom, sandalwood powder, vetiver roots and dried rose petals. The sheermal bread goes well with this stew. The methi maz, on the other hand, is a superb blend of mild tasting entrails and strong-flavored fenugreek leaves.
Tracing its roots to Kashmir is the ever-popular rogan josh, which is spiced lamb cooked in yogurt and aniseed, a spice not very commonly used in other regional cuisines. While tabak maz is spiced ribs fried to crispiness, for the qorma, a lightly sour creamy dish, shoulder of lamb and tail are cooked in milk and dried apricots, and the yakhni uses curd as the base for its sauce. Rista, the first gravy dish to make its appearance in a wazwan, is a meatball of pounded lamb that is silky in texture. After a whole range of dishes comes the gushtaba, a giant meatball made of the same, pounded meat, cooked in a curd based gravy.
A semolina pudding sometimes follows the main courses of the wazwan, but there are not too many sweet dishes in the Kashmiri repertoire. However, a different preparation, served to freshen the mouth after the wazwan, is the gota-a mixture of aniseed, sugar candy, bits of supari (optional), coarsely grated coconut and kernels of muskmelon seeds.
Another specialty of Kashmir is the delicately understated saffron. It is the world's most expensive spice because farmers would have to harvest 70,000 of Crocus sativus flowers to extract 210 thousand stigmas to make one pound, which is less than a kilogram of saffron. One of the beliefs grown around saffron cultivation is that just before farmers start planting the saffron bulbs, they go down to a revered spring and pour cow's milk into it. If the milk sinks into the water, the crop will be good. However, if it floats, it augurs ill for the saffron harvest.
SPECIAL OCCASIONS
Almost every special occasion in Kashmir is celebrated with a wazwan. Named after the cooks who dish out culinary wonders on these occasions, the wazwan is equivalent to a mutton lover's vision of paradise. Eight preparation of mutton are essential for any wazwan and the number can go up to thirty-six. The preparation for the wazwan begins with contacting the family waza or cook who, together with the host, decides the menu. On the day of the wazwan, the waza, accompanied by his various helpers, starts the pounding, cutting and grating early in the morning. Only the leg of lamb is used for dhaniphol, only ribs for tabak maz, only neck for rogan josh, and so on. During the course of a wazwan, amid a veritable storm of courses, not one dish tastes like another. The wazas have a capacity to coax out of the same mutton as many tastes and flavors as there are dishes in the wazwan.
HOW TO EAT
Traditionally, in a wazwan, four persons sit on the floor around a huge round plate made of tinned copper. On the platter is a mound of rice on which the dry ingredients are arranged-half a roast chicken, a couple of jebabs, methi maz, and tabak maz. These are somewhat akin to starters. A troupe of wazas inches their way along the banquet hall spooning out ladles full of meat and gravy into each platter. There is a strict order for doing this, beginning with the rista and ending with the gushtaba, the appearance of which indicates that the wazwan is over.
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